This work presents a variational energy-based model for poromechanics, which can be applied to both saturated and unsaturated porous mediums, containing compressible constituents.
The proposed model is amenable to the use of arbitrary energy density functions for both the fluid and solid phases.
In particular, it can model unsaturated porous media with compressible constituents, and multiple immiscible fluid phases with compressible and incompressible constituents.
Our strategy is to begin with the free energy density function, and use a variational approach to obtain the conservation of mass and momentum, and the pressure equality equations.
An important advantage of the energetic formulation and the minimization structure is the advantage for robust numerical schemes using finite elements and other methods [1]}.
In addition, it can enable efficient numerical approaches to combining physics-based models with data-driven strategies [2]}.
